3D tech news, graphics programming, pixel hacking and demoscene

[Test] OpenGL 4 Tessellation With Displacement Mapping

Just wanted to say that GPU tessellation is really cool! Here are some screenshots from my new piece of OpenGL code that will be available shortly, very shortly 😉

The screenshots show to what a control cage mesh (here a sphere) with 20000 polygons looks like with displacement mapping. The control cage is the low res mesh (low number of polygons). I used a uniform tessellation level of 32 and I played with various height and normal maps. It’s just amazing to see how some simple textures can shape a simple sphere…

I successfully tested my new benchmark on a GTX 480 (R259.09 and R258.96), and on a HD 5770 (Cat 10.6 and Cat 10.7). But on a HD 5870 WITH Catalyst 10.7, here is the result:

I had to use a camera to shot the bug because it was impossible under Seven. Catalyst 10.7 seems to have a serious bug with Radeon HD 5870 and OpenGL tessellation…

30 fps on extra-highend videocard is too slow. Looks like tessellation is not useful for real-world projects. We will have to use high tess level to apply displacement mapping, for example, on high-detail building and we will get comparable polys count with low fps.